Prof. Andreas Bieler and I have been awarded a grant of £275k by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a project on ‘Globalisation, national transformation and workers’ rights: an analysis of Chinese labour within the global economy’ (RES-062-23-2777; full project proposal). The project starts to run from 1 October 2011. On this blog, I will regularly provide a discussion of empirical findings related to this project.

Monday, 1 October 2012

Can Chinese Workers Eat Apple?

On
24 September, the iPhone 5 was launched in the first nine countries/areas,
America, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Hong
Kong. It will go on to be launched in 22 more countries in the week beginning 1
October. The first weekend’s sales were very impressive, reaching 5
million. This number already broke Apple’s previous record for first-weekend
sales of all previous models of iPhone. I wonder, when all those Apple fans are
camping outside to be ‘the first customer’ or at least ‘first group of
customers’ to buy the iPhone 5, has any of the fans thought about the making of
this most advanced, light, cool gadget? This paper links the hot-selling
phenomenon of the iPhone 5 to the Chinese workers, for the very reason that
most of Apple’s iProducts are manufactured in China.

Every
time when I use my mobile, my friends make disapproving remarks: ‘Why are you
still using such an old-fashioned mobile? You are always on the move so you should
get yourself an iPhone.’ I thought the function of a mobile was to call and
text people when one is on the move. I agree that smart phones seems to make
life easier in this internet-connected world, but why does it have to be an iPhone?
My friend who works in a hi-technology company in Taipei told me: ‘Because the iPhone
represents a life-style, you are different from other people because you have
an iPhone, or put in another way, you belong to a certain group because you
have an iPhone.’ After seeing the first launch weekend of iPhone 5, recorded
sales of five million, and long waiting lines outside shops on the streets of
London, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo, I finally understood the meaning of my
friend’s words. Those five million people (actually even more, because many
others didn’t manage to buy iPhone 5 on the first weekend because of limited
supply from Apple) all believe that they are in a certain group, advanced and
globally connected online all the time, the group of the Information Elite. I
guess very few of this Information Elite group’s members will look closely at the
making of Apple’s iProducts, the majority of which come from a giant assembling
factory, Foxconn in China.

Foxconn
workers are not unknown to the world. In
late May 2010, Foxconn faced a string of thirteen workers’ suicides in the
southern part of Shenzhen. The death toll of Foxconn workers finally reached seventeen
between 2007 and 2010. Foxconn, which was founded in 1974, belongs to Hon Hai
technology group, a Taiwanese-owned giant contract electronic manufacturer
which produces devices for Apple’s iProducts, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Foxconn
is a leader in design, manufacturing and after-sales services for computer,
communication and consumer-electronics companies; it has 420,000 employees in
Shenzhen, in the southern part of China, 300,000 of them at Longhua factory. As
a Taiwanese processing company, Foxconn is by far the biggest in China, with
more than 820,000 employees. Furthermore, the Hon Hai Technology group has factories around the globe,
for instance, in the Czech Republic, Hungry, Slovakia, India, Mexico, Malaysia
and Brazil.

Because of the string of suicide cases, Foxconn
became iconic for scholars working on Chinese labour. The most famous is the
work of Prof. Pun Ngai’s team on Foxconn workers, published in book form as ‘To
Survive, Foxconn Workers’ (in Chinese活下來, 富士康工人). There is also a
documentary film about Foxconn workers by Ivan Franceschini
(a PhD
candidate at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Tommaso Facchin(a
freelance translator and documentarist), called Dreamwork China. I was moved deeply by this book and documentary before
I went to China in May this year, so I made an effort to meet some Foxconn
workers in Shenzhen.

After I chatted with some workers at Foxconn, I
realised how young and inexperienced they actually are. Like many of my
Information Elite group’s friends, they have their dreams. Most of them are 18–25
years old, which is certainly an age to have dreams about the future.
Nevertheless, their life at Foxconn is very boring, with endless day and night
shifts. One may argue that it is the reality that workers spend their working
life with machines: there is not much fun in those kinds of jobs. I agree,
different jobs have different contents, but I would argue, Foxconn workers’
life actually represent the greatest alienation from their production. They
produced all the iProducts, but when I asked them, “Would you like to buy an iPhone
or iPad?”, they shook their heads shyly: that is impossible on their wages.
Those young people also have smart phones, but they are ‘fakes’, copied from
branded models. They told me the functions of ‘faked’ smart phones are quite
similar to real ones, and the price is much more affordable. Certainly one may
also argue that this is an appalling infringement of copyright, but if Apple only share
1.8% of the profits with the Chinese workforce when they sell an iPhone and 2%
when they sell an iPad, how could one expect millions of Chinese workers to
pursue their online dream with genuine iProducts?

More importantly, workers in Foxconn are not passively
accepting their excessive working hours and low wages. There have been many
strikes in different Foxconn factories, the most recent being at Taiyuan,
the capital of Shanxi province in the North of China. The Taiyuan unrest only
lasted for around 24 hours and it is claimed as a management problem. However,
the timing of the protest coincidentally clashed with the launch of the iPhone
5. When I consulted the Human Resource Manager at Longhua Foxconn Factory, he
told me that before each launch schedule, workers and factories endured great
pressure to meet the deadlines. Though so far there is no report about what
kind of agreement was reached between workers and management at the Taiyuan
Foxconn factory, certainly workers knew that by protesting at this crucial moment
they would increase their bargaining power. This point actually expands on what
Eli Friedman argued in his seminal paper, ‘Insurgency and Institutionalisation:
The Polanyian Countermovement and Chinese Labour Politics’ (forthcoming in Theory & Society). Friedman observes in his paper that workers(from Naihai
Honda Strike) have realised that as soon as they stop their work on the
production line, management will immediately look into the problem. Millions of
Information Elite groups might not care about far-away Chinese labourers down
there in some unknown factories; however, when the Apple fans cannot get their
hands on iProducts because those Chinese workers simply walk out of their factories,
it would be a problem. Therefore, can the Chinese workers eat Apple?